More on the Fad-Driven® Church

n the book Tony Campolo co-authored with Brian McLaren (Adventures In Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel) Campolo seems to suggest that seminarians ought to pay more attention to marketing techniques and less attention to theology, exegesis, original languages, and other traditional seminary curricula. After all, those are academic subjects with limited practical significance, and pastors these days hardly ever use such stuff after seminary. In Campolo’s own words:

What if the credits eaten up by subjects seminarians seldom if ever use after graduation were instead devoted to more subjects they will actually need in churches—like business and marketing courses? It is not true that with a gifted preacher, a church will inevitably grow. Good sermons may get visitors to stay once they come, but getting folks to come in the first place may take some marketing expertise.

It was a marketing degree, not an M. Div., that Bill Hybels had when he launched the tiny fellowship that would one day be Willow Creek Community Church. It’s not that Hybels is a theological lightweight, contrary to some critics. His sermons are biblically sound and brilliantly relevant to the needs of his congregation—and the relevance comes not from giftedness or theological discernment, but from thoughtfully studying his congregation. As any good marketer would, Hybels deliberately surveys his people with questionnaires in order to determine what they worry about, what their needs are, what’s important to them. . . . Then he schedules what subjects he will preach on in the coming year, and circulates the schedule to those on his team responsible for music and drama in the services.

The result is preaching that is utterly biblical and acutely relevant. But the process isn’t something you’ll learn in most seminaries. Maybe it’s time that some business school courses find their way into seminary.

Church leaders these days are obsessed with image, opinion polls, public relations, salesmanship, merchandising, and customer satisfaction. They have been taught and encouraged to think that way by virtually every popular program of the past two decades.

It has been nearly twenty years since George Barna published Marketing the Church. In that book, he proposed this then-revolutionary notion: “The audience, not the message, is sovereign.” That is the basic idea that underlies every Fad-Driven® church. And it’s a notion that thousands of pastors and church leaders have uncritically imbibed—and it has been parroted in virtually every major book on church leadership up through and including The Purpose-Driven Church. The audience is sovereign. Their “felt needs” should shape the preacher’s message. Opinion polls and listener response become barometers that tell the preacher what to preach. That’s what Barna was calling for back in 1988. He wrote,

If [we are] going to stop people in the midst of hectic schedules and cause them to think about what we’re saying, our message has to be adapted to the needs of the audience. When we produce advertising that is based on the take-it-or-leave-it proposition, rather than on a sensitivity and response to people’s needs, people will invariably reject our message.

Compare that with the words of the apostle Paul, who said, “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables” (2 Timothy 4:2-5).

What was Paul’s point? Do you think he would have agreed with Barna, who said we must adapt our message to the preferences of the audience, or risk having them reject the message?

I think not. Here’s what the apostle actually did say to Timothy: “But you . . . fulfill your ministry.” “Preach the word! . . . in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching.”

That is what pastors are called to do—not ape the fads and fashions of our culture. Not even to follow the silly parade of evangelical fads. I’m convinced that those who do not get back to the business of preaching the Bible will soon see their churches shrivel and die—because, after all, the Word of God is the only message that has the power to give spiritual life.

And, frankly, the death of the fad-driven churches will be a good thing in the long term. It’s something I hope I live long enough to see.

Editor’s Note: “If we do not preach about sin and God’s judgment on it, we cannot present Christ as Saviour from sin and the wrath of God. And if we are silent about these things, and preach a Christ who saves only from self and the sorrows of this world, we are not preaching the Christ of the Bible . . . Such preaching may soothe some, but it will help nobody; for a Christ who is not seen and sought as a Saviour from sin will not be found to save from self or from anything else”

2 responses to “More on the Fad-Driven® Church”

I think everyone hates what they see rightly as a fad driven church, the watering down of the truth, and the obsession with worldly success. However there is a huge point to made for ‘studying’ the people we are reaching. This is not a novelty. and the church has at different times swung one way or the other between studying the Lord, and studying the world.

But any missionary, will tell you the importance of decoding the culture of those you are reaching. Learning the language, and customs, and life patterns, so that we might incarnate and ‘become’ like others to win them over to the one we love. Just as St. Paul does in Athen’s when he reframes the religion and proverbs of that culture.

I cringe too when we co-op the language of marketing but, the truth is, that we have the greatest news to promote and proclaim, we want to build a reputation for Christ by our works, our Lord commands us to ‘sow’ the gospel widely, and to let our light shine., and we are disobedient if we are just sitting in our churches tucked away from the world, reciting to ourselves that these are just ‘wicked times’.

I’ve been in churches where the passion and sense of accountability to reach the lost stop short in just holding true to the gospel, assuming that those God is at work with who will come to us (perhaps our circle of friends who see our changed life).

This is a perversion of the sovereignty of God. The Lord Jesus did not ask us to simply be experts of the doctrines of grace, experts in whatever good theology, we would rightly revel in. He calls us to figure out a way to share the grace of Christ, for how will they hear, lest we send a preacher?